


The Dweller in Darkness

by Wagontrain



Category: Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft, Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Dark, F/M, Gen, Knowledge is Not Power, Miskatonic University, No happy endings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-04
Updated: 2018-09-04
Packaged: 2019-07-06 15:39:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15888993
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wagontrain/pseuds/Wagontrain
Summary: Jughead scowled, caught between satisfaction of being proven right and knowledge that being proven right threw him into a chasm of implication to which no human should have to bear witness.  “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”“There are many, many things you don’t understand,” Hiram replied as Jughead pulled out a chair and seated himself.  “And it will likely be safer for you to continue in that ignorance.”Betty, Jughead, Archie, Cheryl, and Veronica are determined to find Polly.  Unfortunately for them, they have no idea what they're rescuing her from.





	The Dweller in Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [village_skeptic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/village_skeptic/gifts).



_As children, we are taught that there are rules. That we are part of an orderly society and that if we play by the rules, then we’ll get ahead. Riverdale is no exception to that; no exception to that lie. There are rules, though they’re not the rules we think they are. If you’re not on the inside, you’ll never know them. And more often, those rules are disintegrated by the crawling chaos. After all, every system devolves towards entropy in the end._

* * *

“So what do you think happens after you die?”

Jughead’s question hung in the air for a moment. Betty’s brow furrowed as she thought through the question seriously, and Veronica kept a prim, tight smile that hinted that she not only knew the answer but had a perfect _bon mot_ to express it. Only Archie actually spoke. “Come on, Jug, nobody needs another excuse to think about death.”

He was right, of course. The death -- the murder -- of Jason Blossom changed the way people in Riverdale talked to each other. Where before there was a peaceful exchange between neighbors, now there was a tension in the thick air: _What happened to this place?_ No one was quite able to put words to it, but on some level everyone understood that something essential to Riverdale was eroding. 

The sweltering, unseasonal heat didn’t help either. As far north as Riverdale was nestled in maple country, the summer heat typically broke by August and swiftly chilled to a bracing winter. Not this year; this year it was the middle of September, and it might as well have been July.

“Besides,” Archie said at length, staring through the window to the cars parked outside of Pop’s, “everybody knows. You die, you go to Heaven. Or if you didn’t live a good life…”

Veronica picked up as he trailed off. “Hell, of course. A very popular topic of the sermons at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, especially after Father Lawrence had a few drinks.” She laughed at Archie’s uncomfortable look. “Don’t be so provincial, Archie-kins. My parents have hosted any number of priests in our home, and we are nothing if not attentive to the needs of our guests.” She turned to Betty. “Thoughts? Thanatological or otherwise?”

“Sorry, this isn’t…,” Betty shook her head and leaned across the table. “Guys, I don’t want to sit around having philosophical conversations about death when Polly is still missing. And Jason, if he even knew anything about where she could be, certainly can’t help us from beyond the grave. I don’t buy the story that she just ran off. We have to do something to find her.” She shook her head. “I’m not interested in an afterlife, I’m concerned with finding or _making_ justice now.” 

“Definitively, if ominously, put,” Veronica said with a wry yet concerned arch to one eyebrow.

“You’re right about Polly. We have to assume she’s alive until we know she’s not.” Jughead said. “Come on, guys, what can we do here?”

“My parents banned me from her room after she disappeared,” Betty replied. 

“And of course you one hundred percent respect such restrictions,” Jughead commented drily.

“Well…they’re also out of town this week, some kind of journalist conference. Maybe I can finally find a clue.” She looked around the table. “I need to learn the truth.”

Jughead nodded. “While you’re doing that, I’ll go to the library and keep looking into Blossom family history. Follow up on some of our leads about Jason.”

“Polly kept talking about this farm they were supposed to live on one day,” Betty interrupted.

“A farm, out here? That really does narrow down our parameters,” Veronica rolled her eyes. Still, schemes danced behind her eyes. “I do wonder, though. Daddy pays attention to all kinds of things.”

“Come on, Ronnie,” Archie said. “I’m sure he can help.”

Hiram Lodge had arrived in town a few months back, and it already seemed like he had always been there and would never leave. There was a way about him, how he _said_ things, that just made other people bend to his whims. He was a dangerous tool to wield, but if anyone could…

“You’re right. Of course.” Veronica turned her smile on Archie, whose expression immediately softened into a smile of his own under her warmth. “It never hurts to ask, and I’m sure daddy would do whatever he could to send back a wayward sheep.” 

“Okay! Good! Thanks, everyone.” Betty said. “Tomorrow’s Saturday. Let’s reconvene back here at Pop’s around dinner time with whatever we’ve learned. Maybe we’ll have Polly back by next week.”

* * *

Even though she knew for a fact that her parents weren’t around, Betty did a quick circuit of the house just to be sure. She locked the front door to give her forewarning if they unexpectedly returned, and mounted the stairs to the second floor.

If she was being honest with herself, her precautions had little to do with fear of being caught in her absent sister’s room. That was an expected sort of transgression, the kind of worry that she was supposed to have in this sort of situation. No, Betty realized that her need to protect herself from prying eyes came to her in direct proportion to the darkness she felt welling up inside of her, like a storm drain overflowing and disgorging its contents out onto the street. The feeling had been building bit by bit over the weeks since she’d returned from her internship until she found herself coming to in the night, awakened by the sensation of water sloshing around her and the fleeting sensation of something large swimming by.

Betty knew, instinctively, that she couldn’t let anyone see her when the darkness began to overtake her. Archie would look out for her no matter what, like the good, loyal friend he had always been. Veronica would insist on taking her out shopping, and tell some torrid story about a time she had been mean. Well-intentioned, but she would miss the point. And Jughead…he cared about her enough to try and help her, the noble dork, and he had enough problems of his own. 

Betty stood in front of Polly’s door, and the darkness burbled around her knees. 

She placed her hand on the doorknob and twisted, opening the room that had been kept sealed for weeks. It was much as she remembered it; a bed still as messily made as when Betty first searched the room after learning Polly had disappeared, Polly’s jewelry tossed across on the dresser. Betty moved through the objects carefully, searching for anything that could suggest her sister’s whereabouts. She found receipts for a hotel room, but no, that was from months ago when Polly and her friends went to a concert. A bus ticket, back from when Polly visited a friend in Boston. Betty tore open one of the dresser drawers, her patience fraying, and slammed it home when she couldn’t find anything more interesting than tank tops.

The drawer rebounded, just a little.

Betty froze, then pushed the drawer back into place. That one drawer refused to get in line with the others. Betty pulled in free of the dresser and set it gently on the bed. Taped to the back side of the drawer was a thin moleskin journal, no more than an eighth of an inch thick. It came free in her hands, and Betty sat on the bed as she began to read.

 _I don’t want to keep this relationship a secret anymore. Jason says all the right things, and I believe him, but I’m tired of passing by him in the hall and pretending I don’t know him. He says he’s waiting for a sign from his family, but his grandmother already gave him her engagement ring. I don’t know what more of a sign he could want…_ Betty skimmed further, stopping when Polly’s usually loopy cursive shifted to be more sharp and tense. _The dream went on longer than usual last night. I was floating along on the river, but this time there was something with me, swimming below the surface. I remember that it was unsettling, but tempting…I tried to see it. The thing below lets me glimpse its outline, but that’s all. Honestly, I don’t know if I’m following it, or it’s following me. Trepidation doesn’t describe the feeling in my belly when I woke this morning. Anxiety and fear of the thing, yes, but also allure._

Betty’s fingers clenched, creasing the small journal’s pages; Polly’s dream was _familiar_ in a way that set her nerves on edge, but when she tried to think about what it meant her mind skittered away. Betty returned to the journal.

_I told Jason about the dreams yesterday. I had to tell someone, and my family wasn’t a possibility. Mother has no tolerance for outlandish thoughts, and father just…no. I don’t want to scare Betty. But Jason was excited! He said that this was the sign he’d been waiting for. I still don’t know what all of this means, but Jason wants to explain it to me. He offered to introduce me to someone who is supposed to make it all clear, at the farm near Sweetwater Lake. And last night the dream was more vivid than ever. I could smell the lake, and I swear I felt the thing against my skin._

The entry was dated the day Polly disappeared. Betty re-read it, trying to make sense of Polly’s thinking. Who was this mysterious someone who was supposed to change Polly’s life? The only people who knew were Polly and Jason, and Jason was dead. 

Betty rose to her feet, pocketing the journal, and replaced the drawer in its slot. She smoothed the wrinkles on the bedsheets, and closed the door carefully behind her as headed downstairs. 

Jason had secrets from the world, but few from his twin.

* * *

Thornhill perched on its ridge, gothic spires giving the mansion the air of superiority over the serfs of Riverdale. Cheryl Blossom watched Betty leave her car and cross the driveway, poised in a manner that seemed casual if one ignored the tightness in her shoulders. “I’m afraid we’re not interested in purchasing mediocre cosmetics,” Cheryl offered glibly. “Though if you’re in particularly dire straits, I’d certainly be willing to make a personal donation.”

“I’m not here about money, Cheryl. Can I come in?”

Cheryl paused for just long enough to make plain that she was making Betty wait. “Of course. Mi casa es su casa, and I stand ready to serve as a guide should you get lost in some of the more expansive rooms. I’m afraid we don’t have a repast prepared, but I’m sure I can find something for you.” Betty followed her inside, and coughed to interrupt. 

“I’m actually here about Polly,” she explained.

The pleasant expression froze on Cheryl’s face. “Ah,” she intoned. Then, in a more chipper tone: “What can I tell you about my brother’s second-to-last mistake?”

Betty let the jibe pass. “I found this journal in her room. Polly wrote about her dreams, and apparently she talked to Jason about-”

“Stop,” Cheryl commanded. “I’m disinclined to humor your flights of fancy.”

“For pity’s sake, Cheryl, they’re not flights of fancy.” Betty produced the mole-skin journal. “She’s got pages of this stuff, just talking about dreams of swimming in a river…” She broke off as the feigned passivity of Cheryl’s expression cracked. “Cheryl?”

“At first she just woke up feeling like she’d been in water. Then she remembered dreams of swimming in a river.” Cheryl’s comments were statements, not questions. 

“Well…yes.”

“And then recognizing a thing shaped like a man hidden in the water, pacing her. And an _insidious_ sense that the thing was…bizarrely desirable.”

“How do you know that?” Betty breathed, clutching the journal to her chest. 

Cheryl stared at her for a long, hard moment. Then: “I watched a documentary about dreams. On Lifetime. It was quite informative.”

“You made that up.”

“Offense!” Cheryl scoffed. “A Blossom is only as good as her word. And besides, I didn’t say it was a very good documentary. But sometimes one just vegs out in front of the TV on a rainy Saturday. You’d understand if your family could afford cable.”

“Cheryl, you know something about this,” Betty grabbed Cheryl’s arm, forcing them face to face. “I know because you’re usually very good at lying, and right now you’re _not_. What’s going on here?” Cheryl’s eyes glanced from Betty’s face to the hand on her arm, meaningfully, and Betty released her. “Please. I need to find my sister.”

Cheryl stared at the floor, then gestured towards the living room. “Let’s speak in the parlor.” Betty awkwardly sat at Cheryl’s insistence, suppressing a yelp of surprise as she sank into the dramatically overstuffed settee. Cheryl sat opposite from her, and took a breath. “I’ve been having the same dream for months now, almost a year. They started subtly, and slowly increased until they filled my mind. Soon it was the only dream I had, and the vision of water and sinuous forms haunted me even in my waking hours. It became an ache, this desire to seek out water. I thought I was going mad, until…”

“Until Jason talked to you.”

“Jason,” Cheryl repeated tersely. “Jason thought he knew something about it. A few months before he died, he developed an obsession with family history and memorabilia. He’d spend hours going through old boxes in the attic, these ancient decaying trunks from before the Civil War. He read old books and found these strange little statues, and he told me about a pact the Blossoms made before the founding of Riverdale.”

Betty bit her lip. “A pact for what?”

“Power, of course.” Cheryl rolled her eyes. “I loved my brother dearly, but he had the same lusts and whims that all men do. It was all a fiction; a story from a time when the Blossoms felt they had something to prove. Either way, Daddy caught him reading some old book and was furious with him. Took all the old books away and burned them.” Cheryl’s mannered tone faltered. “I was humoring him that day, you know. He said he knew something about the dreams I’d been having, and he was going to show me. Jason went ahead to Sweetwater River to ‘make preparations,’ and I found him dead when I followed.” She shrugged. “Someone didn’t want those preparations made, I suppose. And since then, the visions have only gotten more invasive.” 

“Cheryl,” Betty said slowly. “A pact is an exchange. What did the Blossoms give up in order to get their power?”

A brief flicker of uncertainty crossed the other girl’s expression. “Nothing useful, I’m sure.”

“Look, this is…this isn’t just an old wives’ tale. First you start having these dreams, then Polly, and now…”

“And now?” Cheryl nodded. “Ah. The dreams have begun for you, too.”

“They started a few weeks ago,” Betty admitted. 

In another circumstance, Cheryl might have pressed her red lips into a tight smile of victory, having extracted such an admission. Now, she just nodded. “Well. That’s most distressing, isn’t it?”

* * *

As always, Archie did his best to swallow his impressed gawking as he entered the Pembrooke. The dark, somber rooms gave the impression of unspoken power running through the place.

“It’s just a simple conversation,” Veronica said. “Daddy likes you.”

“I know, I know,” Archie replied. “It’s just that…it doesn’t feel natural, asking something of your father. You know what I mean?”

“No,” Veronica said with a puzzled frown.

“It just doesn’t feel right.”

Veronica led the way into the Lodge apartment, smiling brilliantly at her father. “Hello Daddy.”

“Veronica. Archie.” Hiram stood at the open door of his study, a snifter of dark alcohol in his hand. “Planning on staying in for the night?”

“Actually, daddy, Archie had something he wanted to ask you in private,” Veronica said, kissing her father on the cheek. 

“Did he now?” Hiram asked.

“I thought…?” Archie started.

“Don’t be silly, Archie. Ask him.” Veronica offered him a winning smile. “I’ll be in the living room.”

Hiram invited Archie into the study with a sweep of his arm. “Please, come in. What’s on your mind?”

“Well…the thing is, Mr. Lodge, it’s about my friend Betty.” Archie sat on the couch, as directed. “Her sister went missing…”

“Yes, Veronica mentioned that. Terrible affair.” 

Archie licked his lips. “You know things, Mr. Lodge. I’m not saying you’re involved, or anything like that, but you’re connected. People talk to you. It’s breaking Betty’s heart, not knowing where her sister is or if her sister is safe.”

Hiram sat back in his own chair, and took a sip from his glass. “Family is important,” he allowed. “And I understand that Betty is like family to you, yes?”

“I’ve known her forever.”

“Forever,” Hiram repeated, nodding in amusement. 

Archie felt himself almost physically pulled into the silence that Hiram allowed between words. It occurred to Archie, dimly, that his devotion was a strange, bound thing. He had never been a leader, but at some point had prided himself in being His Own Man, and his reflexive subservience should have been strange. 

Before he could consider it further, Hiram’s voice drew his thoughts back into line. “You’ve a way of finding trouble, Archie. You’ve proven yourself to be quite the catspaw.”

“I don’t own a cat, Mr. Lodge.”

“Of course, Archie.” Hiram steepled his fingers. “I appreciate that you brought this to me, but I don’t see that I can help. While I do pay attention to things, missing persons cases are better handled by the police than by private citizens.”

“But Mr. Lodge…”

“I’m sorry, Archie.” Hiram rose to his feet, and Archie automatically followed suit. Something in him pushed him to argue back on Betty’s behalf, but it was a small, feeble thing. Archie allowed himself to be shown out to the living room. “I know you’ll do the right thing.” 

Hiram closed the door, leaving Archie alone in the living room. He ran a hand through his hair with a long sigh. 

“Conversation didn’t go as planned?” Archie startled, spinning around with a gasp. Veronica stood right behind him, without the usual preceding footsteps. “Whoa, careful there.”

“Where did you come from?”

Veronica pressed a finger to her lips, and beckoned him out into the hall. Archie followed her in silence until they left the building and reached his truck. “He wouldn’t budge. Said he wasn’t willing to help Betty, that it was an issue for the police. Like they’ve done anything.”

“Well of course,” Veronica said. “Daddy’s a mobster. He likes to do favors for people he can get favors back from. You don’t have much to offer.” Veronica ignored Archie’s mildly surprised expression. “Still, it served its purpose. While you were keeping Daddy’s attention, _I_ was able to go full Wikileaks on his safe. Take a look.” Veronica produced a number of envelopes. “Daddy is keeping tabs on a huge number of properties all around Riverdale. Most of them are within town limits, but one…” she unfolded a conspicuous piece of paper, “…is a farm in the next county over. And while Daddy seems to be trying to buy up a lot of the properties, he’s just been keeping an eye on the farm. He’s had Andre watching the grounds several nights a week for months.”

Archie accepted the report and skimmed the words. “There’s a dozen people living on this farm, including a woman who arrived just after she disappeared.” He looked up. “We have to tell Betty.”

* * *

Libraries felt like home to Jughead in a way the trailer never did. There was permanence to the place, and a sort of security in having a spot where he could settle in and lose himself in knowledge. It was a bastion for Jughead’s particular reality, where he could pull away other people’s lies, and there was something comforting about seeing words laid out in black and white. The library made tentative attempts at fundraising events every few years, but the unavoidable truth was that it was a decaying building that was used by few and loved by fewer. Paint peeled, wood warped, and Jughead didn’t care.

Typically, Jughead and Betty would work side by side for this kind of archival deep-dive. She’d even become an essential part of the process, someone to encourage him past his cynicism to look for the capital-T Truth of a story and he missed her there beside him today. But Jughead knew Betty well enough to recognize that the wild-eye look that she sometimes got meant that she wanted to be alone. So, Jughead poured himself into reading, first in the library’s historical archive room, then sifting through the periodical sections, before finally consolidating his findings in the library’s sole reading room. 

Jughead had started with an early history of the Blossom family, written by the house patriarch of 1941. It was informative, if dry and self-aggrandizing, but the part that caught Jughead’s attention was the marginalia. Written in an elegant, angular hand, some previous researcher connected events mentioned in passing in the Blossom family papers to larger events in Riverdale as a whole that hadn’t been deemed worthy of the Blossoms’ attention. Those margin notes, in turn, sent Jughead chasing down a variety of different leads, until he had enough notes, clippings, and photocopies to cover the table…and enough information to start getting the shape of the shadow stretching over Riverdale.

Being considerably closer to the Canadian border than the Mason-Dixon line, the War Between the States hadn’t affected Riverdale all that much, besides the loss of a few young men who went off to defend the Union and never returned. But a few months before the treaty of Appomattox had been signed, it appeared that Riverdale had started to suffer a strange epidemic. Children in town began to be born with minor deformities. The mothers in question were all women of good Christian standing, and denied any sort of unusual behavior during their pregnancies. Jughead reviewed the photocopy of an old diary entry before him:

_The boy is healthy, no doubt of that. But there’s something queer around the eyes. They’re wide, wider than any infant’s has a right to be and look fit to fall out of his head. His skin, too, seems to be always a bit clammy. Hepzibah seems troubled by this, as I’d expect she would be, but when I try to discuss it with her she passes it aside._

There were also a few comments that made their way into the historical record about these children as they grew up. None ever seemed to fall into trouble with the law, but most references to them described them as eerie or unnerving, and that they mostly stayed to the fringes of town, beyond what was now the modern South Side. While most of the towns folk were grudgingly willing have them around, most tried to avoid the unnerving children though Hester Blossom made several impassioned speeches encouraging others to be kind to her children. The most thorough account he could find described an incident where one Arthur Wilson was caught in a grain thresher while working on a farm, his arm mutilated at the elbow. When the doctor arrived, he found Arthur trying to continue to work, seemingly untroubled by his abrupt truncation.

The situation was severe enough to have attracted the attention of researchers from Miskatonic University. The _Riverdale Register_ offered a breathless series of articles about these men of science, who spent the winter of 1882 and much of the spring of 1883 in the area, making use of devices that no one in town quite recognized or understood. The researchers eventually concluded that chemicals leaking into the Sweetwater River from a factory in Greendale were to blame, and strongly advised that all women of delicate constitution avoid the water entirely. 

It was also around this time that a rash of nightmares afflicted the people of Riverdale. A letter from the town mayor to his cousin described fleeting impressions of malice and strife; it went on to comment that he asked the learned men from the university about the dreams, and that they were obligingly willing to make available their disconcertingly large supply of laudanum to any who requested it. 

Jughead wiped his brow; the cheap window-unit air conditioners couldn’t keep up with the heat crushing down on him. It didn’t feel right, as if somehow the temperature itself was a malicious thing. He took a desperate swig from a can of soda; the condensation clinging to the side was thin and tepid.

Roughly four months after the researchers from Miskatonic University left town, Elizabeth Ann Jensen disappeared. Her brother’s journal detailed her disappearance and the desperate search to find her. In examining church funerary records, he found more than two dozen instances over the next fifty years where the deceased were laid to rest without an actual body to bury, and all of them seemed to happen in the summer and autumn months. Polly wasn’t the first woman to go missing, just the most recent in a long, perverse tradition. 

Jughead had wasted time, myopically narrowing his focus to reports of missing women and becoming more frenzied when he failed to find any instances after 1934. It wasn’t until he took a step back, metaphorical and literal, and allowed himself to reset that he began to see the bigger picture. Perhaps it was some meager, protective action of the mind, desperate to distract from the horrid truths he was beginning to guess at. Something itched at the back of Jughead’s mind. He had done research before, and from that experience he knew that the volume of information he had amassed should have taken days, not hours. But everywhere he looked, something relevant showed itself. It would be insane to think that the journals and articles were being laid before him, or that he was being guided to them. No. This was a problem for another day, Jughead decided, and set the thought aside with the care of a man disposing of a ticking bomb. He had taken a few minutes, walked around the library floor, and returned to attack the newspaper archives with vigor.

 

In 1934, a Riverdale businessman by the name of Herman Lawson had complained in a town council meeting that his daughter Victoria had been approached by agents of the Communist Party of the US, seeking to draw her into their Red economic philosophies. While there was some discourse about the benefits of the recent New Deal policies, many agreed that such programs were about as close to communism as they were willing to tolerate, and attempting to recruit young, pure women was a long step beyond common decency. Outrage grew quickly, temporarily papering over old enmities; Jughead read several optimistic accounts about how the Blossoms and members of the South Side Serpents working together heralded a new era of relations in Riverdale. 

By the end of that week, a mob had marched on the farm past the South Side, and had seemingly delivered themselves into a massacre. The reports he could find were fragmented; some claimed the communists fielded Thompson sub-machine guns and mortars, others wrote horrifying descriptions of hulking, scaled men who shrugged off whatever violence was done to them and laid into the Riverdale citizens with bloody ease. 

The mob had retreated back to Riverdale proper and called for help from the government. With unusual haste, a company of Army veterans of the Great War were dispatched via train. Though no public records were available of the military’s engagement with the communists, Jughead found several private diaries recounting four nights of seemingly endless machine gun fire and explosions, punctuated by the faint, distant screams of dying men and shrill howls of less human things. All sources agreed, however, that the battle ended with a thick cloud of chemical gas that had left Riverdale residents coughing and choking, and the communists dead…although curiously, the Army never acknowledged using such a weapon.

Jughead sat back in his chair. His heart _thumped_ against his rib cage, again and again, ignoring his attempts to will it to slow. He examined maps of the communists’ farm, both as it had been in the 1930s and an aerial view from Google Maps. They showed nominally the same arrangement of structures; a main barn, a farmhouse, a grain silo, several ancillary buildings. A large lake, that the Sweetwater River fed into. Not far from where Cheryl and Jason Blossom made their fateful Fourth of July day trip. 

Outside, the light was dying. Betty, Archie, and Veronica would be waiting for him at Pop’s. Jughead wiped his brow, and tried to force the desperate rhythm of unease in his chest to slow. It didn’t work.

* * *

“Well, Edgar Allan Poor is here,” Cheryl said as Jughead slipped into the booth. “Maybe we can get started? We’re only experiencing a probably-existential threat both to me and-” she nodded towards Betty, “-others. So. Cards on the table, Scooby Gang. For the last year, I’ve had intrusive visions about Sweetwater River, and the things in it. Anyone else?”

Betty put her hand up. Archie, Jughead and Veronica shook their heads. “I don’t remember my dreams,” Veronica said.

“That must be wonderful,” Cheryl intoned.

Jughead cleared his throat. “I found a lot of references to weirdness at a farm near the lake feeding Sweetwater River.” 

The stunned silence was answer enough. “My father’s been watching that property,” Veronica said. 

“Jason talked about that farm. Seems it used to be a Blossom property before a familial schism in the 1880s,” Cheryl added.

“Polly thought that Jason was going to introduce her to someone important there,” Betty said.

“Right,” Jughead said. “What we have is an abundance of coincidences. It looks like that farm was home to a lot of unusual stuff in the ‘30s, and it’s been quiet…until now.”

Archie stared out the diner’s window. Darkness had set in, and the neon of Pop’s signs did little to hold back the tenebrous reality around them. “Look, if Polly’s in there, we have to help her leave.” The glistening chrome of the diner was a thin, flaking armor against the aberrations that stalked the night outside, and his football letter jacket felt like false protection against the unknowable waiting in the gloom.

“We don’t actually know that she’s being kept against her will,” Jughead replied carefully.

“It pains me to admit it, but Archie’s right,” Cheryl said. “Whether she wants to be there or not, Polly is tied up with something bizarre and dangerous at that farm, and that danger is directly adjacent to me. I’d like to check on the well-being of that particular canary.”

“So it’s decided,” Veronica said. “Let’s go to the farm, see if Polly’s there. If she’s not, then it’s just a fun fieldtrip in the woods. If she is, then we pull her out.” 

“That’s a great idea, Ronnie,” Archie said immediately.

“Good. Yes, let’s do it,” Betty said, waving across the diner to Pop Tate to get their bill. 

Only Jughead noted that something was odd about how much sense Veronica’s words made.

Cheryl insisted that everyone ride in her scarlet red convertible – something about maintaining her image. Betty sat in the back, squished between Jughead and Archie, watching the dark trees passing by, and feeling the darkness numbing as far up as her waist. Jughead put his arm around her shoulder, and she offered him a tight, worried smile. She glanced towards Archie, and noting his distraction, shifted back to show Jughead the grip of a pistol hidden in her bag. “Safety first, right?” she murmured. He nodded uncertainly.

The convertible’s headlights flashed past the gate blocking the road. Archie got out and undid the simple latch, letting Cheryl glide the car through. No lights shone in the distance, though they could just barely make out the shapes of the barn and the farmhouse. “We should split up,” Veronica said. “Check the different buildings faster.”

“What?” Cheryl demanded. “No. That’s not-buying-Apple-stock-in-2007 stupid. We stick together so that I have as many of you between me and the creepy-crawlies as possible.” They left the car behind, making their way as quietly as possible along the gravel road. The moon hung massive and bright in the sky, and Betty was both thrilled by the light it provided and unnervingly aware of how visible it made them. They reached the farmhouse unhindered, and Archie tried the front door. 

“It’s open,” he whispered, letting the door swing clear.

The first floor had a kitchen, living room, and a dining room with a table long enough for a dozen people. “It’s all very pastoral-chic,” Cheryl muttered, casting shade at the mounted deer heads. Betty shushed her to silence. 

Betty led them up the stairs, testing each step for noise. They made it to the top and were faced by a long hallway, doors on either side. She gestured everyone to stay put, and crept ahead; each door had a nameplate nailed at eyelevel on the door, and she checked each as she passed. The fourth on the left read ‘Polly Cooper: 3rd generation derivative from Blossom line.’ Betty and Cheryl shared an incredulous look. With a scowl, Betty turned the knob.

The door opened without a sound, and Betty stepped inside. The bed was a mass of blankets with someone huddled underneath. For a moment, it crossed Betty’s mind that the person there might not have been Polly -- that this might have been a trap -- but she pushed aside those thoughts and shook the sleeping form. “Polly?”

The woman in the bed woke, startled, and sat up. “Betty…? Betty!” Polly embraced her sister, gasping in relief. 

“Are you all right? Did they hurt you?” Betty asked. 

“Hurt me? No, Betty, that’s…that’s not how it works here. But listen. There is so much that Dad never told us.” Polly took Betty’s hand. “You and me? We are the heirs of an accord made hundreds of years ago. We have a _purpose_.”

“You’re…not making sense,” Betty said, looking around for Polly’s shoes.

“Sorry, I’m still waking up,” Polly explained, making no effort to move. “I was in the middle of the best dream…”

“You should definitely tell me about it later,” Betty said, rising to her feet and trying to pull her sister along with her. Polly refused to budge and instead guided Betty’s hand to the swell of her belly. “You’re…you’re pregnant. Did you and Jason…”

“Jason?” Polly smiled. “No, Jason was the shepherd, that wasn’t his place.” She pulled Betty close, her arms tight around her. “I’m so happy you’re here, and that you came on your own! I was terrified that they would have to bring you here; that you’d be hurt. Betty, I can introduce you to the beautiful music-makers of the lake. The fins and scales are strange at first, but once you understand that they’re descended from divinity it’s like your very soul opens to them. I can hold your hand while they bless you; I didn’t have that when Jason presented me to them.” She stroked her belly. “I want it to be better for you.”

“What…are you talking about?” Betty asked. “We’re leaving here. We can go home.”

Polly smiled, stroking Betty’s cheek. “This is your home now.”

“Oh good, she’s gone loopy,” Cheryl hissed, leaning against the doorframe. 

“Cheryl, get out of here,” Betty shot back, _sotto voce_. 

“The Blossom scion! This is better than I even hoped!” Polly said, with distressing volume. 

Betty reached out, trying to cover Polly’s mouth. “Please, we need to keep it down…!”

“They’re here!” Polly shouted. “They’re here! More supplicants are here!”

“Oh, _fuck_ ,” Cheryl snarled. 

Betty grabbed Polly’s wrist, hauling her out of the bed. “Come on, we need to _leave_ -”

Polly’s fist came around hard and fast, sending Betty reeling. “You have to stay, Betty. This is how it is, you’ll understand once you see the beings in the lake.” Betty grabbed for Polly again, but her sister was ready for her this time, another quick blow breaking her nose in a gush of blood. “Don’t fight us, Betty.”

Betty reeled, her hand reflexively protecting her nose as Polly grasped for her again. Her sister was lost to them, and Betty felt a jolt of terror shoot through her as she realized that she had led her friends directly into a snare. “Okay. Shit. Okay.” Betty said. The threat of certain death or enslavement kicked her sense of self-preservation into overdrive. “Everybody out! We’re going!”

“But are you sure…” Archie’s voice came from the hallway.

“ _Fucking run!_ ” Betty screamed. 

The other doors in the hall opened as Betty hurried Cheryl back down the hall, doors opening as they passed. Betty had the brief image of a figure lunging towards her, bulging eyes wide with lips snarled in a tight leer. The expression shifted in an instant as Archie struck the man with a coatrack.

“What about Polly?” Jughead asked, half diving down the stairs, half twisting back to question Betty.

Cheryl blew past him, racing outside. “Stay and ask her!”

Betty shoved Jughead and Archie in front of her down the stairs and through the living room. Veronica, somehow, was already on the porch, waving them down. “Look!” she hissed. In the distance they could just make out massive figures coming from the direction of the lake, plodding towards Cheryl’s convertible.

“That car is far too expensive to…” she started before Archie slapped his hand over her mouth. 

“There’s too much moonlight to hide in the open,” Veronica said, “and they’ll be out of the house in a moment.” She glanced around. “The barn; we can hide there.” 

They stole across the grass separating the house from the barn, desperately trading off between speed and stealth. The barn was empty but for a mess of hay and a single, scrawny cow tethered to the center column. Archie pulled up the rear, slipping through the open barn door as the first of half a dozen figures spilled out of the farmhouse into the bright night. They called out to the figures near the car in barking croaks, and the figures responded. The figures made similar sounds, but nothing a human throat could create. Betty watched as the goliaths stalked methodically towards the homestead, and gasped as the moonlight lit upon their scaly skin and the bizarre, serrated fins running from their necks down the lengths of their backs. 

“Oh my God,” Cheryl muttered. “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.”

“What…are they?” Archie asked.

“Divine, apparently,” Betty muttered lowly.

Veronica said nothing, watching the beasts move with unblinking interest.

Betty struggled to breathe; the darkness was rising around her, chilling and numbing her body up to her chest even as panic and the abusive autumn heat forced her clothes to cling to her. The monsters across the lawn triggered a sensation of something sinuous and muscular sliding against her body…she glanced at Cheryl, and realized by her cousin’s desperate, terrified, needy expression that she felt the yearning too. 

“We need to leave here. Right now.”

Jughead nodded, a bit too quickly. “Yeah. Yeah, we really…” he glanced to the side. “Veronica?

Veronica approached the cow, hands outstretched. “Look at that,” she muttered, stroking the animal’s fur. “The spot here, on its shoulder…amazing…it’s a symbol, a brand of the Elder Things…” Her hand brushed the spot, and the fur _blurred_ at her touch. Abruptly, the cow sprouted myriad eyes across its face and flanks.

“Jesus _Christ_ ,” Archie hissed.

Several of the eyes retracted, only to be replaced with howling orifices as the cow moved in ways that bones typically would have precluded. Its bovine features melted into a gelatinous mass, muscular tendrils extruding from the thing and groping towards those nearest.

“Car! Now!” Betty screamed, all subtlety gone. 

The used-to-be-a-cow roiled past Veronica, yanking itself forward on pseudopods lashed to the beams holding up the barn’s roof. It thrashed at Betty and the rest, screaming “ _Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_ ” from mouths that formed and dissipated on its corpulence with each utterance. 

Betty shoved Jughead and Cheryl ahead of her, racing towards the car. In the distance, the imposing shapes twisted towards them, alerted by the protean monster’s cries. They were most of the way to the car, but the beast chasing them was far faster. 

Archie slowed to a trot, watching Betty and the rest recede towards the convertible. He tugged at his blue and gold letter jacket, nodding to himself. What mattered was that his friends were safe.

“Archie?” Betty cried, looking around herself. She spotted Archie, facing down the mass of flesh. “ _Archie!_ ” She pulled the revolver from her bag, firing again and again into the beast. Five bullets splashed into it, and didn’t slow the thing down at all.

The thing moved at Archie like a wave, and he swung a powerful punch into its mass. His fist sunk into its elastic flesh, and several new eyes appeared to examine him with baleful intent. Archie struggled to pull his hand free, and teeth began to sprout from the creature’s form.

Betty stood, paralyzed between the need to help her childhood friend and her need to flee, and so bore terrible witness as the thing grew several additional serrated limbs, encircling Archie and tearing his body to bloody pieces in a frenzy of motion. It was only Jughead’s hand on her arm, yanking her back towards the car that inspired her insensate limbs to move. She dove into the back seat, crashing ungracefully into Veronica, as Cheryl tore off, leaving the shrieks of “ _Tekeli-li! Tekeli-li!_ ” echoing in the night behind them.

* * *

They drove, and drove, Cheryl’s foot pressing the accelerator to the floor as they flashed through county roads never intended for such speed. Jughead talked to Cheryl, terse but clear, and eventually her primal fear abated enough to allow her to slow down and guide them through the South Side streets to F.P.’s trailer. He was out for the night, but Jughead let them in.

They sat for a few moments, with no other noise then their panting, labored breathing and Cheryl’s muted sobs. “That thing…” Betty starts. Jughead waved her off, but she couldn’t stop. “It killed him. And the fishmen-things…what were those? Polly’s talking like she’s been brainwashed into a cult? What is going on up at that farm?”

Jughead sat down hard on one of the cheap metal kitchen chairs. “I don’t know. I should have _seen_ …in the ‘30s some businessman in Riverdale complained about Communists holed up at that farm, but they weren’t communists at all.” Betty laid a hand on his shoulder, as much to comfort him as to ground herself. “They were probably more of those things.”

“Or the same ones,” Cheryl said flatly. “Who knows if they can even die.”

Something pricked at the edges of Jughead’s awareness, and rather than shy away from it he plunged forward. He leaned forward in his chair, gripping the sides of the seat to keep his hands from trembling. “Veronica. What did you let loose? What did your father want to happen at that farm?”

“Whoa,” Veronica replied. “I don’t…”

“Bullshit! Whatever you’re about to say, bullshit!” Betty yelled. “You led us to that barn, you wandered up to that cow-thing. You were going on about ‘brands’ and ‘Elder Things,’ and then you set it off!”

“I don’t understand it,” Veronica said, her hands up to ward off her friends’ accusations. “I don’t. I just knew…that cow -- that _monster_ \-- was important. I…I had to.”

Jughead found Betty’s hand, and clenched it tight. “When your dad sent you here, what did he say?”

“My dad didn’t send us. I snuck information out of his safe while Archie talked to him. He didn’t even know…” Veronica trailed off, a look of confusion crossing her face. “No, that’s not true, is it? Everything that needed to happened, happened, and after that comes…no, I don’t want to be done yet.” Jughead squinted at his friend; it wasn’t a trick of the light, Veronica was becoming less substantial by the moment, her edges fading to mist. “Jughead? You asked us before, what happens when we die…” Veronica stared at her hands, swiftly sublimating entirely. “Oh my God. We were wrong. _We were all wrong! There’s nothing here at-!_ ” 

In a moment she was gone, nothing more than a wisp of ether to suggest that Veronica Lodge ever existed at all.

“What…the fuck,” Betty breathed, reaching into the space where Veronica used to be. The darkness welled up around her, reaching her chin and splashing against her face. “Where…how…?”

“I don’t know,” Jughead said. “I don’t even know.” He shook his head, and only then realized that the trailer door was open, and Cheryl missing. “Cheryl!” 

The redhead was a good thirty feet away, walking determinedly away into the woods. She slowed as Jughead called her name again, racing after her and catching her by the arm. “Let me go,” she intoned despondently.

“Come back in here, we can make sense of…”

“No!” Cheryl shouted. “No, don’t you get it? Polly was right. Jason was…Jason was honoring the pact we made centuries ago. He was doing what we all agreed to them, ushering the chosen to…to our fates? And if he isn’t here, I have to go on…” she choked on her words. “On my own. I don’t understand. I don’t understand.”

“I don’t either,” Betty said, her voice low and flat. “But it’s there, isn’t it.”

Cheryl nodded. “Yes, dear cousin. I’m very much afraid that this is what you and I were made for. And I’m even more afraid of how much sense it all seems to make now.”

Betty pulled Jughead away from Cheryl, leaving her to stand alone. “Let her go,” Betty said. “I don’t think we could keep her here if we tried. The call is too strong.”

“What are you talking about?” Jughead demanded. Cheryl, for her part, turned away from them, continuing her solitary trek into the woods. “What call?”

Betty mounted the steps back into the trailer. She made her way through the tight rooms, struggling to breathe as the darkness lapped over her head and left her entirely submerged; she could only hold her breath for so long. She sat on Jughead’s bed, huddled against herself. He appeared in the doorway a few minutes later. 

“She’s gone,” he said. “Disappeared into the darkness of the woods.”

“Sweetwater River,” Betty intoned. “That’s where the ache pulls you. Back to them.”

“Betty, what is happening?” Jughead breathed.

“I don’t know,” Betty sobbed. “I don’t know if it’s fate or biology or damnation.” Jughead sat next to her, sinking the cheap mattress further. “You’re my buoy, Jughead. You know that? Keeping me close to the surface.” 

“I still don’t understand,” he replied.

“You don’t need to,” Betty said, looking up at him through several feet of darkness above her. “Just stay with me tonight?”

* * *

Jughead awoke alone.

He lunged to his feet, fighting off the bleariness of sleep. Betty wasn’t in the room, and it was quickly obvious she wasn’t in the trailer at all. The front door stood open, and he could just barely make out footprints leading towards the woods in the dewy, wet dirt outside. Towards Sweetwater River.

“She’s gone,” he muttered. Betty and Cheryl gone, Archie murdered, Veronica…dissipated, or whatever you call it when a phantasm is no longer a phantasm. Jughead stood at the trailer door, bracing his arms against the frame and rocking back and forth. His mind veered between _these things cannot be true_ and _the Creatures from the Black Lagoon are real and now all my friends are gone_ , leaving a strange quintessence in the brief moments when the oscillations reached their midpoint.

Jughead found his phone in a pocket. Three numbers, and a voice answered with clipped words. “I need to report a murder,” Jughead choked out. “my friend Archie Andrews and I…we were at a farm, outside of town, and an animal killed him. He tried to hold it off to give me time to get away.” The voice said more things, but he pressed on heedlessly. “My friends Betty and Cheryl …they said they were going to Sweetwater River to follow him into the afterlife. I think they meant to kill themselves. Please, hurry, I think you can get there in time.” With that he hung up, tossed the phone aside. It didn’t matter now. 

F.P. probably would have been angry at Jughead for taking his motorcycle into town, but Jughead was past caring about that. He rode the bike, slow and relentless, into Riverdale itself and didn’t stop until he parked outside the old Pembrooke hotel. The doorman was nowhere to be seen, and Jughead let himself into the elevator, and up to the penthouse suite where the Lodges – well, lodged. 

“Well,” Hiram Lodge said, looking up from his newspaper. “Good morning, Jughead.” 

Jughead twitched his head; for a moment Hiram was there alone, and in the next Hermione was there as well. He blinked and she was gone. “Mr. Lodge. I wanted…”

“Sit down,” Hiram said. “You look exhausted. And you’ve had quite a night.”

That focused Jughead’s attention. “I don’t understand how. But you sent us out to that farm. You had Veronica lead us around by the nose.”

Hiram folded his newspaper carefully, and laid it on the table. “Now why would I do a thing like that?”

“Because you’ve been trying to wipe out what’s living there since 1882.”

A tight smile froze on Hiram’s face, and he offered Jughead a long, slow clap. “I do appreciate a man who pays attention.”

Jughead scowled, caught between satisfaction of being proven right and knowledge that being proven right threw him into a chasm of implication to which no human should have to bear witness. “There’s just one thing I don’t understand.”

“There are many, many things you don’t understand,” Hiram replied as Jughead pulled out a chair and seated himself. “And it will likely be safer for you to continue in that ignorance.”

Perspiration beaded Jughead’s brow. “Why did you make it so obvious? Using your same initials, the same initials for Veronica, back in 1934?”

“I did it because I knew you would catch on to it, Jughead.” 

“Me?” 

“Yes. You, personally, Forsythe Pendleton Jones the Third. Sitting in the library, surrounded by notes and clues, sweating as dim realization alit in your mind.”

“You mean to tell me that in 1934 you expected that almost a hundred years later _I_ would notice that you use similar names? My grandparents hadn’t even been born yet.” 

Hiram nodded, an expression of serene bemusement on his face. “I serve as a Messenger for greater things than you can conceive of, Jughead. Yog-Sothoth is the gate between past, present, and future, and because of that I know…well. Quite a bit.”

Cascades of inferences chased each other through Jughead’s mind, some disappearing into explanations too dark to be accepted, others skittering along the surface of Truth. “Did Veronica ever really exist?”

“When she needed to, absolutely.”

“So what’s your game? What are you playing at here?” Jughead demanded.

Something in Hiram’s visage shifted; a darkening, a series of fleeting impressions of shapes moving around him, constantly out of focus like baseball cards in a bicycle’s wheel. “Everyone, and everything, acts in accordance to its nature. You seek, because primates were created to be inquisitive.” 

“Created. By you?” Jughead snarled. “Created for what? To learn more and better ourselves? Or because you just think it’s funny to watch moths immolate themselves against a flame?” 

Hiram only smiled. “I, and the entities I presage are waiting for certain preconditions. Various stars must align. Factors beyond your four-dimensional understanding must-” he snapped his fingers “-click into place. However. A Messenger requires a recipient, and if the Sleeper of R’lyeh awakens, then, well…fewer recipients, if you take my meaning. Fewer moths. Not all who claim to work towards the glory of the Great Old Ones are doing so in a manner that actually benefits their masters. Some are simply too ambitious, or too simple-minded to interpret their mandate correctly. So I choose to dress myself in the mantle of a gardener, pruning back certain errant… _blossoms_.” Jughead scowled. “You, though!” Hiram’s smile beamed at Jughead, who experienced simultaneous awe, delight, and the terror of a cockroach caught out when the lights come on. “You’ve done an amazing job of exposing the cult hiding out in the farm. You’re correct, I’ve been making efforts here and there to erase that wayward sect for more than a hundred years now, and they certainly are tenacious. The police will be along shortly, and everything will be dealt with and covered up, as your sort always do. What is terrible beyond reckoning must be suppressed.”

“So you win,” Jughead intoned. It was becoming more difficult to focus his thoughts, the longer he was around Hiram. The man’s appearance became more swarthy by the moment, and the shade of his skin began verging past any human tone, towards actual coal-blackness.

“Indeed,” Hiram said, his voice taking on an uncanny but commanding resonance. “But I can see that you’re not satisfied with the outcome. Too many fragile things, carelessly cracked and broken. I give you a boon, Jughead, for your unwitting service.” Hiram produced a book from the table beside him, where a moment ago there had been no book.

“You don’t…you don’t do anything for anyone else. This isn’t a boon, it’s the punchline of a joke.” 

“Marvelously put. And true. However -- this book contains the knowledge you need to bring back Archie, and Cheryl. To iron out the wrinkles in Betty’s mind. To revivify Veronica. Take it. It’s a gift.” 

Jughead stared into Hiram’s eyes, wondering how the other…man…? could see with his bizarre three-lobed pupils. The book before them was an ancient tome, bound in leather with bizarre, eldritch sigils embossed into the cover. 

Hesitantly, Jughead pulled the book across the table to him. If his hands trembled as he lifted the leather-bound cover, he didn’t notice. He opened the tome and began to read.

* * *

_“As children, we are taught that there are rules. But we never think about the most important rules, the ones that are so fundamental that we don’t even realize they exist. No one thinks about gravity until they’re falling, and the fate of Riverdale was as inevitable as the last foot of a long, long fall._

_The police raided the farm. No one is willing to tell me what happened, but they do give me newspapers. The next week there were funerals for seven officers and an article about how the farm’s granary caught fire, resulting in a wildfire that wiped out the farm and dozens of acres of surrounding woods. The police also swept Sweetwater River for Betty and Cheryl. In a bit of poetic symmetry, they found Cheryl face-down in the water, a bullet hole in her head. Betty was arrested for the murder, but refused to explain why. All she would say was that she wished that Cheryl had been the one carrying a gun instead of her. She’s pregnant now, and telling them the child is mine. It’s not true. But she needs to believe that something about this is normal, and sane, when absolutely nothing about this is normal or sane._

_The doctors here tell me I need to talk to someone if I want to get better and leave this hospital. They don’t understand that I am talking to someone; Veronica visits me from time to time. She’s teaching me to reach out to Archie. It’s not perfect; it sounds like I’m hearing him from a far distance. But the company is good for me.”_

**Author's Note:**

> There are several elements of Lovecraft's mythos at play in The Dweller in Darkness:
> 
>  _Deep Ones, hybrids, and cultists_ : Deep Ones are amphibious creatures who typically live far enough below the ocean's surface that the light of the sun only penetrates dimly. While several human cults have emerged to revere and worship the Deep Ones, their only interest in humanity is as breeding stock. Deep One/human hybrids initially appear human, but as they age develop ichthian features and eventually become Deep Ones themselves. Deep Ones appear in the story The Shadow over Innsmouth.
> 
>  _The Shoggoth_ : An artificial race of slaves created by the Elder Things that ruled the Earth long before humanity evolved, Shoggoths are creatures with no fixed form. They are constantly shifting and changing, unless forced into a particular form to better-serve their masters. Many of the few remaining Shoggoths have been enslaved by the Deep Ones. A Shoggoth appears in the story At the Mountains of Maddness.
> 
>  _Nyarlathotep_ : The titular Dweller in Darkness, Nyarlathotep is an Outer God. While most such cosmic entities are unaware of humanity or view it as beneath their contempt, Nyarlathotep takes a personal interest. He has countless avatars and uses them both to enact the will of the other Outer Gods and to manipulate events to his own ends. In The Dweller in Darkness, Nyarlathotep's avatar is Hiram Lodge with a purpose of eliminating a Deep One cult that founded itself too far inland to be useful. A Nyarlathotep appears in the story Nyarlathotep and may be behind you right now.


End file.
